Confessions of a Conservative
Wills, Garry
CONFESSIONS OF A CONSERVATIVE Garry Wills Doubleday / $10.00 Arnold Beichman There is nothing the matter with Ameri cans except their ideals. The real Ameri can is all right; it is the ideal...
...But what about the opposition of people like Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, and thousands of others either exiled or still in Russia-the dissidents...
...Has he amended Tom Wolfe's "Me" Decade and introduced his own: the "Me, Too" Decade...
...You wouldn't know that there was a Stalinist terror during this antiseptic "deployment of national capital...
...The phrase "holy war on communism" is one of the hoariest cliches of the anti-anti-Communists, in which the word "holy" really means "unholy...
...The real puzzle, of course, is why Wills wants to call himself a conservative...
...After all, conservatism, old and neo-, is all the rage these days...
...it is the ideal American who is all wrong...
...Thus Stalin merely "absorbed adjacent territories," but Polk, McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt engaged in "seizures of territories...
...One does not have to condone Communism in order to condemn the kind of crusade America mounted against Communism in the 1940s and 1950s...
...As far as Wills is concerned, "Russia's recent progress is not as different as we would like to imagine from what happened in our 'economic miracle' of the nineteenth century...
...gering his moral purity, to claim that he is objecting only to fanatical "holy wars"on Communism and to pretend not to be siding with the Communists...
...To put it another way, how could Daniel Patrick Moynihan have dared in 1975 to call Idi Amin a "racist murderer" when in the 1930s there-were pellagra, outhouses, and lynching in the South...
...It permits the accuser, without endanArnold Beichman, a political scientist, is author of Nine Lies About America...
...Cold War in the spring of 1947 with his plan to 'rescue' Greece and Turkey/' In another passage, he attacks American democracy by praising Hellman and her long-time friend, Dashiell Hammett, as possessed by "a personal code that makes pride possible in a shameful social order...
...Were Wills to list, say, Stalin's "injustices" (even the few Khrushchev mentioned in his 1956 speech), the awful injustices he attributes to the U.S...
...in the past, Wills is able to minimize totalitarian horrors still going on...
...Chesterton If a political category could be copyrighted, then conservatives could successfully sue Garry Wills for copyright violation and I would be delighted to submit a brief amicus curiae...
...During this modernizing Russia "also absorbed adjacent territories...
...would appear so mild as to make his equation of the two more obviously dishonest and ridiculous...
...The simple thing to do is to say that Garry Wills isn't a conservative and leave it to his Maker or analyst to figure out the reason for his mis-identity crisis...
...It is the mark of the unyielding anti-anti-Communist that no fight against Communism can ever satisfy his moral standards (and no resistance to apartheid, junta-ism, or capitalism can ever be called a "holy crusade...
...Or, as someone said about Oscar Wilde, I wish Wills would take off his face and let us see his mask...
...If there are dissidents," says Wills, "we had our critics of the Gilded Age-Twain, the Adams brothers, and Henry James...
...But it isn't that simple, because Wills, the self-proclaimed conservative, is in reality an anti-anti-Communist...
...Wills is quite specific, however, in describing the injustices that accompanied "America's rise to power...
...In discussing Russia, he uses soothing words that make the injustices seem inevitable and therefore, by Willsian theory, moral...
...It is a further sign of the anti-anti-Communist that, while referring in general to "injustices in Russia and China," he never offers examples of such injustices...
...mortgaged the nation to a rail system, to be protected and made profitable with the help of naval and cavalry power Our own blacks, Indians, Chicanos, Orientals, and white laborers were treated shamefully Yet the nation in general supported the effort despite risk and inequities...
...For if Garry Wills is a conservative, then I'm a Druse paleographer...
...G.K...
...because of their opinions than were murdered by Hitler...
...Admittedly," writes Wills, "there were injustices in Russia and China-as there had been slavery, the genocide of Indians, the seizures of territories in America's rise to power...
...The phrase "shameful social order" is not applied to Russia where, as Diana Trilling recently wrote, "More people have been killed...
...Russia modernized its agrarian society "by state seizure and deployment of national capital-lands and goods devoted single-mindedly to a rearming as a refashioning process...
...But by conceding the injustices in Russia and China and then comparing them with those of the U.S...
...The esprit of the Russian people indicates similar backing for its great economic recovery and industrial breakthrough...
...To understand Wills' impersonation better, one should recall what he wrote in his introduction to Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time: "A newly aggressive Truman had launched the An fact, Wills doesn't really consider events in Russia or China to be " injustices" at all...
...After all, the U.S...
...I wish Wills would wash away the make-up and let us see what he really looks like...
...The reason is obvious...
...For example, he attacks William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell because in 1946 "the two waged holy war on communism" (seeking absolution, Wills later confesses that he didn't question his "own Cold War mentality" until the 1960s...
...And if our past can be equated with the daily practice of repression in Russia and China, then it is surely the height of hypocrisy to mount a "holy war against communism...
Vol. 12 • August 1979 • No. 8
